Somerville for Palestine: Grassroots mobilization for justice

Somerville, Massachusetts

“Will you sign our petition for Palestine?” An army of mostly young volunteers from Somerville for Palestine (S4P) has been asking this question up to 50 times a shift for the past three months here.

Fueled by their deep commitment to the Palestinian people, many volunteers show up for the weekend, weekday and evening shifts. They are asking people to sign a petition that would direct the Somerville City Council to stop using taxpayers’ money to fund Israeli genocide in Palestine.

Somerville has had $1.7 million in school contracts with Hewlett Packard (HP) to supply laptops to its students in the last 10 years. HP also supplies surveillance equipment and passbooks to Israel — just like the ones used in apartheid South Africa. Palestinians are forced to carry them when moving around their own country. HP is also partnered with the Israeli army.

Hundreds of Somerville High School students have asked the School Committee to get rid of all the laptops supplied by HP.

Somerville also has money invested in Caterpillar, a U.S.-based corporation that supplies bulldozers to Israel. The Israelis use them to smash Palestinians’ homes. In 2003, one crushed and killed Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old activist from Washington state as she knelt in protest in Rafah trying to defend a Palestinian home.

The petition directs the City Council to put the following question on the ballot in November on Election Day:

“Shall the Mayor of Somerville and all Somerville elected leaders be instructed to end all current city business and prohibit future city investments and contracts with companies as long as such companies engage in business that sustains Israel’s apartheid, genocide and illegal occupation of Palestine?”

S4P aims to collect 10,000 signatures to ensure that the petition has 5,000 valid signatures. When in mid-June S4P turned in about 3,000 signatures, the Election Commission claimed that they were submitted too early and called them invalid.

After the weeks of hard work needed to collect the signatures, S4P resisted this cruel decision and fought back. With the help of the National Lawyers Guild, they were able to beat back this attack. Another several thousand will be submitted soon. The deadline is September.

The canvassers told Workers World that conversations in the streets have been a good way to educate and expose people to Israel’s crimes and U.S. complicity in murder and starvation in Palestine.

Sara Halawa, a founder and lead organizer for S4P, said: “We want to normalize the conversation against genocide, apartheid and occupation on the streets in Somerville. We have had thousands of conversations, and people are overwhelmingly for Palestine.”

Speaking of the young people who crowd the S4P meetings that take place every other week, Halawa said, “We have given people the space to put their grief into action.”

Canvassers have been harassed by Zionists. S4P has de-escalation training to teach canvassers how to deal with harassment in a safe way. This has isolated the Zionists and moved them out of the way.

Halawa continued: “The issue of Palestinian liberation intersects every other struggle against oppression and for justice. Somerville for Palestine is a space for people to come together to push back locally in solidarity with Palestinians facing apartheid, genocide and occupation while recognizing that collective liberation is the goal.

“By building a strong community around Palestine, we’ve been able to mobilize hundreds of Somerville for Palestine supporters in solidarity with immigrants facing ICE terror, to vote no preference in the Democratic primary and to show up on the picket line for striking workers. Somerville for Palestine members are in the struggle for collective liberation — none of us are free until we’re all free!”